Films & Schedules
- Spanish Language

BAD DAY TO GO FISHING

DIRECTOR: Alvaro Brechner - URUGUAY

This quirky tale pits a scamming hustler and his wrestler sidekick against the inhabitants of a small Uruguayan town.

A combination of quirky dark drama and deadpan satire plays out in this stylish tale of a washed-up wrestler and a smooth conman in a sleepy village in South America. “Prince” Orsini, an impresario, arrives in a small town with his protégé, a one-time German wrestling champion named Jacob Van Oppen. Orsini’s scheme is to use Jacob’s status to lure locals into duels with him, promising a large cash sum to anybody who can pin him in three minutes. In reality, the matches are fixed to protect Jacob’s reputation—and Orsini’s income. The pair’s plan is threatened when an opponent is too drunk to wrestle, and femme fatale Adriana, eying the non-existent $1,000 prize, offers up her muscular husband as the replacement opponent. Jacob, nursing sore muscles, a nasty cough, and an even nastier alcohol habit, is in trouble. “Brechner’s ambitious debut is something like a retro The Wrestler by way of the Coen brothers.”—Variety.

First Feature Film.

This year’s Uruguayan submission for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar.

DAWSON ISLA 10

DIRECTOR: Miguel Littin - CHILE

Dawson, Isla 10 focuses on the imprisonment of advisors close to the deposed socialist government of president Salvador Allende. The men were jailed and endured hellish conditions on the island, the world's southernmost concentration camp, for more than a year.

After the military coup in 1973, deposed President Salvador Allende’s closest collaborators and ministers were locked up in a concentration camp on Dawson Island, lying at the western entrance to the Strait of Magellan. They are assigned numbers instead of names. Their lives are spared thanks to pressure from the International Red Cross, but they are not spared from torture and forced labor. Thirty years later, some survivors return to the island and rediscover the place where they learned to survive in such extreme conditions. Miguel Littin, who spent many years living in exile and to whom writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez dedicated his book “Clandestine in Chile: The Adventures of Miguel Littin,” took inspiration for his drama from the autobiography by Sergio Bitar, one of Allende’s ministers.

Filmography: The Promised Land (71), Letter From Marusia (76), Alsino and the Condor (82), The Shipwreck (94), The Last Man (05).

This year’s Chilean submission for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar.

GIGANTE

DIRECTOR: Adrián Biniez - URUGUAY

The story of a supermarket security guard's obsession with a late-shift janitor.

Jara (Horacio Camandule) spends his nights as a security guard on the graveyard shift at a Montevideo supermarket in stoic silence—eating pastries, doing crossword puzzles, and watching the confines of his world go by on a bank of TV monitors. Something stirs in Jara, though, when he catches sight of a cleaning woman (Leonor Svarcas) in the fluorescent glare of the empty supermarket floor. Too shy to speak, he begins following the woman after work, decoding her secrets while continuing to deny his own. Will the gentle giant ever summon the courage to approach her? Set against the dreary background of economic recession and distinguished by Camandule’s heart-wrenching performance, this nearly silent one-way love story—which the director himself considers “a subversion of the classic … romantic comedy”—earned three awards at the 2009 Berlin Film Festival, including the Silver Bear and the Best Debut Film Prizes.

THE INHERITORS

DIRECTOR: Eugenio Polgovsky - MEXICO

Eugenio Polgovsky’s remarkable documentary is a day-by-day study of the lives of several groups of child laborers in rural Mexico.

Polgovsky’s poetic The Inheritors, which he wrote, directed, and edited, immerses us in the daily lives of children who, along with their families, survive only by their unrelenting labor. Polgovsky (Tropic of Cancer, PIFF 29) documents reality in rural Northern Mexico in a way that captures the people’s dignity and humanity as they work long hours, in often hazardous conditions, picking tomatoes, peppers, corn, and beans. The film observes them in other labor routines, such as producing earthen bricks, cutting cane, gathering firewood, ox-plowing fields, and planting by hand, as well as in their artistic endeavors, such as carving wooden figures and weaving baskets to sell. The indelible impression: from the frailest elders to the smallest of toddlers, the cycle of poverty continues.

MUSIC ON HOLD

DIRECTOR: Hernán A. Goldfrid - ARGENTINA

In this sensational comedy, a film composer with writer's block and a pregnant executive enter into an unusual bargain to keep a secret from the exec's conservative mother.

Ezequiel, a nearly broke film music composer, has 20 days to deliver a score. He’s just not hearing it. One day he calls his bank, and listening to muzak while on hold for Paula, an executive he’s never met, he hears a song that inspires a breakthrough. How to find that song again, among the hundreds of inane on-hold muzak tunes? Paula, meanwhile, has not told her very conservative mother that, though she is pregnant, she is no longer with her boyfriend. When mother and composer both wind up in her office, she impulsively introduces Ezequiel as the father. They each have something the other needs, and though they are not even acquaintances, Ezequiel and Paula soon enter into a strange partnership. A witty romantic comedy that has been a sensation in Argentina, Hernán Goldfrid’s breezy film features a stellar cast, including Norma Aleandro, Diego Peretti, and Natalia Oreiro.

NORA’S WILL

DIRECTOR: Mariana Chenillo - MEXICO

Before dying, Nora devises a plan to make José, her ex-husband, take care of her funeral during the height of Passover celebration. But despite her meticulousness, she misses something—a mysterious photograph left under the bed which leads to unexpected outcomes.

A divorcée plots to reunite family and friends on the eve of Passover in this affecting, understated comedy set in Mexico City’s close-knit Jewish community. José learns that Nora, the woman he was married to for 30 years and then divorced, has committed suicide. Forced to wait five days for the funeral to allow his son to be present and the rabbi to officiate, José in the meantime discovers that Nora had prepared all of the plans and food for a final Passover Seder. But Nora also left something else: a curious photograph that may unlock the mystery of her life and death for the family she left behind. As curmudgeonly José reluctantly prepares for the funeral, a colorful collection of characters assemble in Nora’s apartment, including disapproving rabbis, a devoted housekeeper, a half-blind aunt, and the couple’s grown son. Winner of Audience Awards at festivals in Morelia, Miami, and Moscow, Chenillo’s warm and witty tale speaks to audiences everywhere.

SONS OF CUBA

DIRECTOR: Andrew Lang - GREAT BRITAIN

Sons of Cuba follows three boys at the prestigious Havana Boxing Academy as they prepare for the 2006 National Boxing Championship of Under-12’s.

Sons of Cuba is set in the legendary Havana Boxing Academy, no ordinary institution: this is a boarding school that handpicks nine-year-old boys and turns them into the best boxers in the world. The results have been stunning—Cuba has dominated Olympic boxing for the past quarter of a century. The boys’ duties extend far beyond the ring: they are groomed not only as world-class fighters, but also as international symbols of their country. Castro dubs them “the standard bearers of the Revolution.” Lang follows three young hopefuls through eight dramatic months of training and schooling as they prepare for the biggest event of their lives, Cuba’s National Boxing Championship for Under-12’s. During the season, crisis strikes: Fidel Castro, the boys’ leader and inspiration, is taken ill, and all of Cuba’s Olympic boxing champions defect to the USA, leaving the boys contemplating a future which is altogether different from the one they have been taught to believe in.

THE WIND JOURNEYS

DIRECTOR: Ciro Guerra - COLOMBIA

Ignacio Carrillo, a retired musician, journeys to return his supposedly cursed accordion to his old teacher. Along the way, he picks up a teenage boy who dreams of becoming a wandering musician like Ignacio. This touching odd-couple story mixes the evocative landscapes of Colombia with the magic of its music to tell a timeless tale.

Ignacio Carrillo, old and retired, has spent his life traveling through the villages of Northern Colombia playing traditional songs on his accordion, a legendary instrument that was said to be cursed because it had supposedly been won in a musical duel with the devil himself. When his wife suddenly dies, he bitterly vows to never play again and decides to make one last journey—to return the accordion to the man who gave it to him, his teacher and mentor. Setting out on his donkey, he is set upon by a young teenager with romantic dreams of becoming a nomadic minstrel like Ignacio. Reluctant to take him along, Ignacio relents, but in the course of their journey tries to convince him that the life of a minstrel can only lead to solitude and sadness. This touching odd-couple story mixes the evocative landscapes of Colombia with the magic of its music to tell a timeless tale.

Filmography: The Wandering Shadows (02).

This year’s Colombian submission for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar.

WOMAN WITHOUT PIANO

DIRECTOR: Javier Rebollo - SPAIN

Woman Without Piano is a quietly comic look at a Madrid housewife's attempt to escape from her mundane and tedious existence.

Plain, middle-aged Rosa is a married woman with no friends and no social life. She has devoted her life to her family and doesn’t seem to think much of herself. But when night falls, she enters a fun, dark, and absurd new world. With her husband Francisco tucked in bed, Rosa (Spanish TV superstar Carmen Machi, recently seen in Almodóvar’s Broken Embraces) sneaks out to meet a young Polish construction worker at the bus station, instigating a provocative tour of nocturnal Madrid: neon-lit hotels, all-night bars, and dingy launderettes. Rebollo creates a fascinating, disquieting work in which “anything might happen, and the film—winner of the San Sebastian Film Festival’s Best Director award—holds the viewer in thrall by a chain of extraordinarily staged sequences fueled by a visual command and wit that honors the cinema of Jacques Tati, Otar Iosseliani, and Fellini.”—AFI Fest.